Dependence of morphology of pulsed-laser deposited coatings on temperature: a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation

Considering deposition, dissociation, and diffusion of adatoms on the surface of substrates with hexagonal structure, we performed a kinetic Monte Carlo modelling to explore aspects of the thin film growth via pulsed laser deposition (PLD) within the submonolayer regime. First- and second-nearest-neighbor interactions calculated by the Morse potential are taken into account. The simulations show that the behavior of PLD at a relatively low substrate temperature is similar to that of molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). However, with increasing temperature, there would be a crossover to PLD characterized by an increase of the island density with the pulse duration decreasing. Moreover, we show that the scaling function of the island size distribution for PLD and MBE at the temperatures T=250 and 550 K. Similarly, the scaling function for PLD resembles that of MBE at the relatively low temperature, and then, it is markedly different from MBE at the higher temperature. The physical origins involved in the growth behaviors above are proposed.